1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to the field of data communications in a wireless network. More specifically, the invention relates to a system and method for communicating information to a mobile communication device (“mobile device”) within a wireless data network (such as an IP based wireless data network) and also for replicating information between a host system (or a host system with an associated messaging server) and the mobile device via the wireless data network.
2. Description of the Related Art
Wireless data networks are known in this field. Early wireless data networks include the Mobitex network and the Datatac network. These early networks provided limited data capacity and also required to have fixed addresses for each mobile device. Such a fixed address is also known as a “static” network address. Recently, however, new types of wireless data networks have emerged having much greater data bandwidth. These new data networks, such as the GPRS network, may utilize the Internet Protocol (IP) for routing data to a mobile device. The inherent addressing limitations of the IP protocol (and other similar packet protocols) typically limit the use of have static addressing in these types of data networks, thus leading to a dynamic addressing scheme. In this type of addressing scheme, a pool of available network addresses is dynamically assigned to a much greater pool of user devices depending on which devices are accessing the network at a given instant.
As described in more detail in the co-pending, and co-owned application S/N, a wireless data network can be coupled to one or more redirector applications for enabling real-time mirroring (or redirection) of user data items from a user's office computer (or corporate server) to the user's mobile device. In such a redirector application, user data items, such as e-mail messages, calendar events, etc., are received at the user's office computer, which then redirects (or mirrors) the data items to the user's mobile device via the wireless data network. It would be advantageous to extend this redirection system to operate with newer wireless data networks such as the General Packet Radio Service (“GPRS”) network, or other networks that may utilize a packet protocol, such as IP, in which the wireless data network dynamically assigns network addresses on an as-needed basis.